Saturday, August 20, 2016

The conflict
archaeologist’s teaching contract at the University of Glasgow was coming to an
end late last year. McNutt had earned his master’s degree and doctorate at the UK
university and while in Europe had done research on the locations of
battlefields from the Middle Ages. Through the school's Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, McNutt had helped excavate a World War I site
(Somme in France) and others from World War II (Stalag Luft III in Poland and aircraft
crash sites in Scotland).

McNutt, 33,
ran across a job posting back in the States. Georgia Southern University in
Statesboro was looking for an assistant professor of anthropology. Duties
include overseeing the school’s Camp Lawton project.

“Lawton was
the main thing that attracted me to the job,” said McNutt, who will oversee GSU
research and archaeological excavations at the Confederate prison site a few
miles north of Millen.

The camp
broke into the news in 2010 when federal, state and campus officials announced
that its location had been confirmed and it was already yielding a trove of
artifacts.

But there’s been
no activity on the site in more than a year. McNutt’s predecessor, Lance Greene, took a position at Wright
State University in Dayton, Ohio, after the summer 2015 field school.

Excavation at Camp Lawton (Courtesy of Hubert Gibson)

For McNutt,
who worked on projects in the U.S. Southeast before going abroad, serving as the
Lawton director is an opportunity to continue Greene’s work and explore some of
his own questions about the prison, which was open for only six weeks in fall
1864.

“Preservation
is so bad on U.S. Civil War prison sites, especially Confederate ones,” said the
Alabama native. But not at Camp Lawton. Archaeologists have been helped by the
remote location of the stockade and relatively minor disturbances of the soil.

McNutt told
the Picket about some of his objectives:

-- Prisoner
of war camps are “excellent places to hide contraband, personal items you are
not supposed to have. If you are rousted in camp, left on a train early in the
morning, as they were (at Lawton) those are the kinds of things that are to be
left behind.” McNutt wants to know whether some of the shelter areas include
digging tools, stashes of forbidden resources or items used in trade with
guards. “That leads back to what are these guys doing to cope with aspects of
confinement and how are they resisting. How are they mentally resisting the
fact they are stuck here in this camp.” Contraband, McNutt said, can be “a
relatively powerful victory.”

-- He wants
to document how the 10,000 Union soldiers divided themselves up. The
men were to be grouped by regiments and companies. “That is the official
standpoint of Confederacy.” But there are good indications that at nearby Andersonville
(Camp Sumter), there was internal sorting by ethnicity. European coins or
tokens have been found at Camp Lawton and it is known there were many prisoners
of Irish descent.

Friendship ring found at Lawton (Courtesy of Georgia Southern U.)

-- McNutt
wants to learn more about how prisoners used the space available to them. It
was a cold, wet autumn and hundreds died. Getting the perspective from the fort
(Confederate) side of the camp will allow students to ascertain places that
could not be seen by guards.

Over three
years, Greene and his students worked on confirming the location of the
stockade walls and spent a lot of time in the prisoner area, uncovering a
communal brick oven and a dwelling hut. They excavated what is believed to be a
Confederate officers’ barracks, but were not able to identify other Rebel
portions of the site, including where the enlisted men lived.

Greene told
the Picket last summer that a big focus of the Camp Lawton project is
understanding the difference in the quality of life and the relationship
between prisoners and guards. McNutt concurs.

“There is no glass or ceramics in the prison area. They are
having to do with tin cups,” Greene said. “The Confederacy is giving them
nothing and they are getting bad cuts of meat if they get anything at all. A
tin cup was used for water and to eat soup. They have nothing else. They reused
items, railroad piece and metal scrap.”

McNutt said
he, too, will concentrate on the precise locations of Federal and Confederate
structures, including the stockade. He wants to find and excavate potential
corners.

Brass keg tap (Courtesy of Georgia Southern U.)

The presumed Confederate
barracks “is in the gray area.” Artifacts fit the time period. “They are of a
high-quality enough goods they were likely from the kind of stuff the officers
would have had around them.” Accounts by Union prisoner Robert Knox Sneden
indicate that the area should have been surrounded by kitchens, cookhouses and
cabins.

McNutt said
conflict or battle archaeology can be tough. The 1745 Battle of Prestonpans in
Scotland was over in hours. But such locations, where activity occurred in a single
day or over a few weeks, can provide exciting research opportunities, he said.

“It is such a
short burst of activity; they are almost perfect time capsules. You get these
really nice frozen moments in time. The occupation is so short you can tie this
down to specific weeks. Sometimes to specific regiments. I think there is a lot
of that at Camp Lawton.”

So a
relatively short time capsule may demonstrate how the prisoners coped with food
shortages, boredom and loneliness.

McNutt
expects to meet next month with Georgia and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service archaeologists
about objectives and research designs for the next phase of archaeology. (A
portion of the prison is in Magnolia Springs State Park and the remainder is on
the fenced site of an old federal fish hatchery.)

Barracks excavation a couple of years ago (Courtesy of Georgia Southern U.)

The Camp
Lawton director would like to see the earth turned again sometime in 2017 and a
campaign launched to renew public interest. “When exactly that starts is kind of up in
the air.”

McNutt has written what he loves about archaeology: “Researching the
past, thinking about the way people interact with each other, how we use
objects, and objects use us. How we create the present from the past, and craft
national and group identities from these created pasts. And how as
archaeologists, we can pick these themes apart.”

He’s
conscious of Camp Lawton’s ties to other prison sites in Georgia, including
Blackshear and Thomasville. Lawton was evacuated during Sherman’s March to the
Sea and prisoners were sent elsewhere. “I see all three of those sites
interlinked. They are all part of the same story. Camp Lawton can inform on
them and Thomasville and Blackshear can inform back to Camp Lawton.”

McNutt also wants
to restore public days at Magnolia Springs. Visitors can help in the
archaeology on certain weekends and visit a Camp Lawton museum just yards away.

“I believe
archaeology … should exist for education of my students and education of the
public at large,” he said.